Good ol BrandoSando has screwed the community again. First, he announces the secret project and promises us new stories. Then, he “boycotts” amazon with JUST THESE COMMUNITY FUNDED STORIES. Now, he’s making money on books we bought without letting us utilize the accessibility features we’ve come to expect from his other work unless we pay him again.
Tl;Dr Brandon Sanderson is an exploitative greed monster that swallowed 43 million dollars and is hungry for more. Do not buy Brandon Sanderson products until this betrayal is addressed.
The problem is that the community is getting scammed. Brandon pulled his “boycott” with ONLY these crowd funded titles. Then, when his sales on other platforms didn’t do as well as he wanted, he canceled his boycott and finally allowed the titles on Amazon like everything else. The catch is that everyone who already bought the books, the backers, now have to pay for the books again to have them with the rest of the collection on Amazon platforms. It’s a shitty money grab by a fat greedy ass that’s already been paid $43 million and still wants more.
No we aren’t. That’s ridiculous.
Yes, because those are the titles over which he has control of publication.
When he writes a book for Tor, with a Tor editor and a Tor marketing department and Tor advances, Tor has publication rights and decides whether the audiobook is sold on Audible. Same with the other publishers he works with.
The secret projects were published by Dragonsteel, and then licensed out to other publishers for other printings. But that meant he got to control where it was sold, and by whom.
He doesn’t get to make that choice with the other books.
The Kindle version from the Kickstarter works fine for me, I don’t really understand your complaint there. As for the Audible version, you got the audiobook in four formats from the Kickstarter. You got what you paid for. If you want it in the newly available Audible version, you can pay for the Audible version, but no one is forcing you to do so. You can just use Speechify Books or Spotify or anything that works with the M4B version to listen to those books.